Malvern Lions Great Alpine Challenge

New event on the calender this year - The Great Alpine Challenge consisting of 46km of rideable mountain bike terrain, little did I know this was going to be one of the toughest climbing races I have done so far this season...
After a good solid warm up done during the fine, yet windy morning up in Springfield it was off to the start line to begin the 46km journey through the hilly ranges that Springfield land owners had to offer. A fast start through nailing it off the line I broke the bunch up so that Brent Miller, an unknown rider and myself lead the front of the race. After about 8km or so we came off the gravel road and came onto the farm track. Through venturing along this for a couple of kms we hit the first climb. Right at the bottom the unknown rider turned around (think he broke his chain) and Brent and I took off. The first hill was very steep and after the first 50 metres I started getting away from Brent and by the top of the hill had a good lead made (after the race I found out that the hill had gained around 400 metres vertical height over roughly 1.5km). This then took me along the side of the hill and onto an awesome downhill on steep, sketchy and rocky ground and to an extremely fast open section where I got tapped out on my 29'er-serious speed!
Once at the bottom, the course made its way around the lower part of the valley and started another long and steep climb. Once at the top of this, the Sport category shot down right to the finish and for us Elite category riders it was across the long, steep and windy ridgeline to eventually meet up on the original first down hill to complete our second lap down the hill, along the undulating lower valley and up the steep narly final climb.
By this time I certainly had felt like I had done alot of climbing and was very ready to find the finish line finally coming in around 2hour 34mins, 11mins ahead of second place!
After the race through talking to other competitors who had Garmins I found out that over 46km there was around 1760 metres of verticle climbing - can't complain about that for a solid training day!